documentary film, motion picture that shapes and interprets factual material for purposes of education or entertainment. Documentaries have been made in one form or another in nearly every country and have contributed significantly to the development of realism in films.John Grierson, a Scottish educator who had studiedmass communication in the United States, adapted the term in the mid-1920s from the French worddocumentaire. The documentary-style film, though, had been popular from the earliest days of filmmaking. In Russia, events of the Bolshevik ascent to power in 1917–18 were filmed, and the pictures were used aspropaganda. In 1922 the American directorRobert Flaherty presentedNanook of the North, a record of Eskimo life based on personal observation, which was theprototype of many documentary films. At about the same time, the British directorH. Bruce Woolfe reconstructed battles ofWorld War I in a series ofcompilation films, a type of documentary that bases an interpretation of history on factual news material. The GermanKulturfilme, such as the feature-length filmWege zu Kraft und Schönheit (1925;Ways to Health and Beauty), were in international demand.

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TheBritish documentary film movement, led by Grierson, influenced world film production in the 1930s by such films as Grierson’sDrifters (1929), a description of the British herring fleet, andNight Mail (1936), about the nightly mail train from London to Glasgow. TheUnited States, too, made significant contributions to thegenre. Early examples include two films directed byPare Lorentz:The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), set in America’s dust bowl, andThe River (1937), a discussion of flood control.

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The production of documentaries wasstimulated byWorld War II. The Nazi government of wartime Germany used the nationalized film industry to producepropaganda documentaries. The American directorFrank Capra presented theWhy We Fight (1942–45) series for the U.S. Army Signal Corps; Great Britain releasedLondon Can Take It (1940),Target for Tonight (1941), andDesert Victory (1943); and theNational Film Board of Canada turned out educational films in the national interest.

In the early 1950s attention once again focused on the documentary in the British free cinema movement, led by a group of young filmmakers concerned with the individual and his everyday experience. Documentaries also became popular intelevision programming, especially in the late 1960s and the early 1970s.Seealsocinéma vérité.